"Manifesto to the Governments and Peoples of the Christian Nations Threatened by Judaism": The First Anti-Jewish Congress in Dresden (September 11-12, 1882)

In the following manifesto of the First Anti-Jewish Congress, held in the Saxon capital shortly after the first wave of German antisemitism peaked, participants wove virtually all the threads of the “Jewish question” into the fabric – the fabrication – of a monumental struggle against international “Jewish parasitism.” Claiming that all Christian nations had no choice but to recognize the Jew as biologically alien, it called for a reversal of Jewish emancipation and for the expansion of an antisemitic “movement of self-protection.” The meeting's delegates constitute a virtual Who’s Who of German, Austrian, and Hungarian antisemites at the time. That these figures were still vying with each other for leadership of the movement is suggested by the addendum co-authored by two Bavarian aristocrats. But the delegates were in agreement that previous government initiatives in defense of the “Christian state” had been ineffective. The tone of this document is very different from the preceding description of the “Reichshall Meeting”; yet for purposes of agitation, it was its perfect complement, purporting to document the international “Jewish conspiracy” with historical “facts” rather than with inflammatory phrases. As such, it is typical of other contemporary manifestos, pamphlets, and pseudo-scientific tracts that also claimed to offer empirical evidence of the Jews’ so-called “lust for world domination.”

To the Governments and Peoples of Christian Nations Threatened by Judaism!

In the course of the past centuries, the culture, civilization, prosperity, and future of the European Christian peoples were threatened, in turn, by Arabs, Tartars, and Turks – peoples of a foreign race and religion whose attacks and onslaughts were successfully fought back by the weapons of European Christians at the time. Likewise, in our times, another foreign race threatens the culture, civilization, prosperity, and future of the European Christian peoples – a foreign race that is no less dangerous. Nay, in terms of its means and objectives, it is probably even more dangerous than those aggressive national elements. This foreign race is the Jewish race.

The proper instinct of the European Christian peoples has kept this natural, sworn archenemy in check until very recently. It is an archenemy against whom restrictive legislative regulations have only proven to be half measures and inadequate weapons for protecting Christian people.

Since the beginning of the current century, however, this situation has changed quite radically, on a step-by-step basis, in some European countries.

The victorious ideals of the French Revolution – liberty, equality, and fraternity – have torn down the barriers against the Jewish race that had been erected for the protection of the Christian peoples.

The principle of liberty was also applied to a race whose first and foremost thoughts and energies are everywhere aimed at putting other nations in the moral and material shackles of slaves by all kinds of cunning behavior. According to the Jews’ religious and national traditions, all of these peoples were created merely to serve them.

The principle of equality was also applied to a race that does not wish to be equal with us, that considers itself a people privileged by God and [regards] the rest of mankind as lower beings, impure animals.

The principle of fraternity was also applied to a race that does not even acknowledge non-Jews as neighbors and fellow human beings and according to whose Talmud non-Jews are enemies destined for eradication. Moreover, cheating, stealing from them, bleeding them dry, bringing ruin upon them, perjuring against them, dishonoring, and even killing them constitutes an activity pleasing to their God.

Small wonder, therefore, if modern liberalism, identifying more and more with the ascendant Jews, has taken the shape of pseudo-liberalism. In the Jews’ hands, it has turned into a convenient tool for realizing their plans for world domination and putting irons on the European peoples.

The Jews have become the undisputed masters of the financial markets. They dominate the stock exchanges, where they determine the price of money and monetary values, commodities, and industrial goods at will. As a result, they are the ones controlling the capitalist’s purse, the fruits of the farmer’s and businessman’s labor. They dominate the banks and all financial institutions in general. Consequently, they are the creators of fictitious values, the masters of credit and monetary turnover, whose channels they open up, at liberty, to their own fellow tribesmen while closing them off to any non-Jew not to their liking.

The natural consequence of this monopolization of the financial market is that the farmer, the big landowner, the industrialist, the artisan, the merchant, etc., have all gotten caught up in material dependency upon Jews. And because their livelihood became subject to the arbitrariness of the Jews in this way, they were forced to turn into their obedient servants, their trainbearers. What’s more, the Jews hire influential men who are active in public life to fill well-paid positions at banks, railways, insurance companies, etc. These individuals are thus virtually kept as Jewish vassals and are the most zealous and influential supporters of Jewish power in the legislatures and governments.

The tip of this economic and financial pyramid is the Rothschild “dynasty,” which has turned into the banker to financially needy countries. Without its agreement, waging war is virtually impossible nowadays. And if a war is waged after all, it represents merely a good opportunity for this “dynasty” to add more billions to those it already has and to concentrate more and more of the capital assets of the European peoples in the hands of the “dynasty” and the Jewish race, even by exploiting their national calamities.

Through incredible national debt burdens that are continuously increased by the Jewish financial powers and which sap the nations’ marrow, the governments of some indebted countries have become nothing more than Jewish institutions, Jewish collection agencies. This explains the complete inactivity of these governments with respect to the Jewish question and also their hostile behavior against their own populations in favor of Jewry.

The Jews have managed, on the one hand, to gain direct control over the majority of the periodicals and, on the other, to exert an indirect influence on them in their favor, so that until recently no newspaper in Central Europe would have dared to speak the truth vis-à-vis Jewry.

Thus the Jews have become absolute masters, fabricators of public opinion. Any complaint raised against them, however justified it may be, is suppressed. Any article that addresses the subject of Jewish dominance to the slightest extent is done away with. They bestow praise and reproach on the living and the dead, on rulers, statesmen, civil servants, scholars, artists, etc., even on individuals’ private lives. The professional advancement of men active in public life and the recognition and rewarding of their achievements is dependent upon the favorable position of the Jewish press. Consequently, anyone wishing to reach his goals through some kind of public career is forced to curry the favor of the Jewish press and thus that of the Jewish clan.

As a result of this situation, intellectual slavery and moral cowardice vis-à-vis Jewry is one of the most characteristic features of our age. Aspiring young professionals are worried about their future; elderly men who have made a name for themselves are concerned about their past and their posthumous reputation. And in order to secure these things with the help of the Jewish press, they become trainbearers of Jewish power, they turn into traitors to their own nation and race and thus to their own blood relations.

In many countries, the Jews have adulterated the system of [freemason] lodges, stripped it of its essence, and degraded it into one of the most dangerous and effective instruments of Jewish power.

Mainly by means of the press, Jewry increasingly undermines the Christian religion, which, after all, has become a racially specific religion of the Aryan European peoples, the magic influence of which none of the Aryan European peoples has managed to escape. This insight is proven by eighteen centuries of history. During this entire period, no new religion based on something other than the Gospel according to Christ managed to develop among any of the European Aryan peoples.

During Roman times, it was Christianity that saved the European Aryan race from moral bankruptcy, on the one hand, and semi-civilized barbarity, on the other, and also regenerated it. It did so by setting the civilization and culture of the European Aryan race on firm religious, moral, and social foundations.

Christian religion is the most powerful reaction against Jewish tendencies to achieve world domination. It is an insurmountable protest against the elevation of the Semitic above the Aryan race, and so it is only natural that the Jewish clan is a sworn mortal enemy of both the founder of this religion and the Christian religion itself.

Accordingly, Jewry can only firmly establish the superiority and rule of the Semitic race when it has managed to defeat the natural reaction opposing it and to destroy the institution of Christianity. The latter thus constitutes the first and major target of its attacks.

Because the Jewish people has essentially retained its age-old nomadic nature, it is unfamiliar with the idea of the fatherland. As a cosmopolitan, the Jew adheres to the principle: ubi bene, ibi patria (“where it’s best, there is the fatherland”). Consequently, the Jew cannot be a patriot attached by love, devotion, and self-sacrifice to the soil upon which he was born and that was tilled by the sweat of his brow. If a Jew also engages in farming [Landwirtschaft] here and there, it is nothing but robbing the land [Raubwirthschaft]: ravaging the forests, exhausting the productive energy of the soil, and thus rendering it increasingly infertile. He also does not till the soil; for he does not take the plow, scythe, and hoe in his own hand, nay he does not even like to hire others to till the soil. He regards the land more like a mere mortgage, the farmer as a slave to be exploited through usury, the fruits of whose hard labor belong to him.

Various laws have freed landed property and made the farmer his own master by abolishing serfdom. But today, after the passing of several decades, we have reached the point of having to free the people from a new Jewish serfdom that is worse than the old one. For the farmer today is under an unconditional obligation to the Jewish usurer and innkeeper, who is in a position, by virtue of the acquired right to auctioning, to drive the farmer out of his house and home at any time and thus make him and his family homeless.

This is one of the major causes of the massive – and increasingly mounting – emigration to America, as a result of which the soil is being deprived, through Jewish usury and Jewish slavery, of its industrious and diligent native inhabitants. Unproductive, haggling Jews now take their place.

Because the Talmud allows the Jews to commit any kind of injustice or crime against non-Jews, the Jews threaten to overthrow the legal order and thus the social order. Criminal statistics prove that Jews constitute a remarkably higher percentage of convicted criminals than non-Jews, and it is even higher among accused criminals. As a result of the close solidarity among Jews, however, a large number of the Jewish accused manage to evade punishment – partly with the help of false, mostly Jewish witnesses, but partly through bribing the judicial powers. There are well-organized Jewish bribery gangs who exercise free command over indebted civil servants and judges and whose ties and networks in some countries reach into the highest government and judicial circles.

For this reason, a non-Jew is often not able to enforce his most incontestable rights vis-à-vis a Jew before a court of law; on the contrary, he runs the risk that the bribed officials, in cahoots with the Jews, will make him the target of life-long harassment and persecution. One characteristic Jewish tactic that above all explains their amazing successes is that once they have chosen non-Jews as victims, they don’t let them out of their clutches – for fear of revenge – until they have either surrendered to them or been materially and morally ruined. Also, since according to the motto of the “Alliance israélite universelle,” all Israelites “are responsible for each other,” Jewry as a whole considers the private affairs of each individual Jew vis-à-vis non-Jews as its own affair. Thus, in the final analysis, non-Jews wishing to claim rights of their own face the entire Jewry.

In practice, under these circumstances, non-Jews do not enjoy the equality before the law granted by the constitution and legislation vis-à-vis the Jews.

Sticking together as closely as it does, the international Jewish pack has an internationally directed executive organ in the form of the “Alliance israélite universelle,” which was founded in Paris in 1860 and operates branches across the entire planet. Supposedly a mere charitable association, it has now assumed the character of a political association that virtually maintains diplomatic contacts with individual national governments. It even had its own delegates represent it at the 1878 Berlin Congress.

This universal political Jewish association enables Jewry to focus all its international weight and power against any attack – or, really, any self-defense action – launched by non-Jews in any corner of the world; it enables Jewry to punish any rebelliousness emerging against Jewish power as an example to others so that it may further tighten the shackles with which it has enslaved the European Christian peoples, mainly in Central and Eastern Europe.

This constitutes a worrisome and ever more oppressive state of affairs with respect to a number of factors: on the one hand, there are the great and ever increasing dangers that the Jewish race under international high command poses to the prosperity, peace, legal security, culture, civilization, and future of Christian nations. On the other hand, there is the irresponsible, cold indifference with which many governments sit back and watch their own populations engage in an uneven social struggle for self-defense against Jewry. In some countries, governments even side with the Jews and wrest from their own people the means for self-defense by curtailing freedom of the press, the right of assembly and association, and the right to freedom of expression whenever the Jewish question is concerned. In the face of these issues, and prompted by the conviction that taking the initiative in this matter has become imperative for the self-preservation of all Christian society (without notice to confessional and national divisions), a great number of delegates gathered together in Dresden on September 11 and 12, 1882, for an international congress on the subject. The participants, who came from various countries particularly threatened by Jewry, included members of parliament, clergy, military officers, civil servants, lawyers, physicians, scholars, professors, artists, journalists, farmers, industrialists, artisans, merchants, and other friends of the cause who have engaged with the theoretical study of the Jewish question for years but at the same time know from practical experience the far-reaching implications of this calamity. On this occasion, the participants in the congress engaged in intense discussions of the Jewish question, and experts resolved, among other things, to appeal to the governments and populations of Christian states

This first international congress, taking place with the aim of maintaining the interests of non-Jewish society, does not intend to anticipate events by putting forth a detailed program regarding the solution of the Jewish question.

The current power of the Jewish race rests on much firmer foundations; this nation of parasites has become much too deeply engrained in the body of our societal and state life for this first congress to operate under the delusion that its potentially detailed propositions could be carried out today.

Today, however, we would like to clarify the ultimate goal that the European peoples have to set for themselves. Furthermore, it would be self-delusion to believe that the Jewish race would ever mix and assimilate with other peoples, especially Christian ones – after all, this has never happened anywhere in the course of 3,000 years. Therefore, the congress declares that the Jewish question can only be solved to satisfaction once and for all by following the manner in which the Arab, Tartar, and Turkish questions were solved in the past by the European states under attack.

Europe belongs to the Christian peoples and therefore should not be the testing ground for the hunger for power of any hostile, domineering, non-Christian national element.

The history of past centuries amply proves that legal decrees restricting the Jewish race – no matter how strict they are – do not achieve the desired result. The Jews, against whom it has been impossible to erect any lasting barriers by way of legal statutes so far, would simply remove these restrictive regulations again after a few decades and force the nations into another exhausting ongoing struggle.

The emancipation of the Jews, however, which decades ago raised the expectation in Europe that the Jewish clan would assimilate into the Christian nations, has resulted in an absolute disaster. It has merely served to convince any thinking person that it is completely impossible for the European nations to be able to establish a modus vivendi with the Jewry living in their midst.

By thus leaving, for the time being, the detailed modalities of the solution of the Jewish question to the unfolding events, this first international congress takes as its current mission only the launching and organization of international societal self-defense.

In this context, we would like to address our appeal primarily to governments, but secondarily also to the Christian peoples, to the Christian society of the judaized European states.

We call on those governments, being the councils of Christian rulers comprised of Christian members, that they do not place any artificial obstacles in the way of the continuous – and currently uneven – defensive struggle of their peoples against that sworn enemy, Jewry, by curtailing, with respect to the Jewish question, their people’s freedom of the press, right to association and assembly, and right to freedom of speech. We ask, on the contrary, that they support their own people, their own flesh and blood, in this legal defensive struggle as much as possible for as long as the provisions of common law, and not of constitutional law, are applied to the Jews. Furthermore, by establishing a more rightful financial system and structure of state debt and a more rightful economic system to begin with, the governments also ought to make an effort to free themselves, their states, and their populations from the dictatorship of Jewish financial powers and thus from the political influence of Jewry.

We call, finally, on the Christian peoples who are more or less oppressed by the Jewish race to initiate and organize justified self-defensive action right down the line.

As long as the Jewish race seeks and finds protection under the sanctuary of common law and as long as the provisions of constitutional law are not applied to this race by the governments, this self-defensive action can only take place within the limits of the existing civil laws.

So the Christian peoples ought to tackle the vigorous organization of this legal self-defensive movement; initiate intense agitation and powerful action in the parliaments, in district and municipal councils, in the press, and in public assemblies; found protective associations in cities and individual regions; and form central national committees to head these protective associations, which would be charged, in turn, with establishing international contact with all the different countries, the purpose being to paralyze the meticulous work of the “Alliance israélite universelle” through an “Alliance chrétienne universelle” to be founded sooner rather than later. And in this way, Christian society may win back – step by step and in every field – the positions from which Jewry has driven it.

Hopefully our appeal will not remain a cry in the wilderness, but will awaken Europe’s Christian society to the danger facing it, so that it will proceed at once to take the legal means of justified self-defense. If this happens, then, within a short time, the nineteenth century will be able to rid itself of the disgrace that an anti-cultural race of 7-8 million souls, namely the Semitic race of Jews, is tyrannizing the Aryan (or, through Christianity, Aryanized) race of 350 million souls on intellectual, moral, and financial levels – the very race that, by virtue of its intellectual and physical superiority, has been given the mission of spreading its seed, including its perfected civilization, to all parts of the world by means of victorious arms and works of peace.

And if this appeal meets with a response from the Christian nations and the word becomes the deed, then the second anti-Jewish congress gathering a year from now will already face a new situation changed in favor of the Christian peoples; and then it will raise its voice again concerning further measures.

And now, let’s get to work, Christian brothers!

The International Anti-Jewish Congress for the Protection of the Interests of Non-Jewish Society, held on September 11-12, 1882, in Dresden.

Concise Report on the First International Anti-Jewish Congress in Dresden

The congress took place at the invitation of the following gentlemen:

Friedrich Carl, Reich Baron von Fechenbach-Laudenbach, Royal Bavarian Treasurer and Major (retired) at Laudenbach and Sommerau, Chairman of the Association for the Protection of Trades and Honorary President of the Westphalian Trades Association;

Dr. phil. Ernst Henrici, in Tegel near Berlin, Chairman of the Social Reich Association in Berlin; Victor von Istôczy, Budapest, Member of the Hungarian Reichstag;Lic. theol. Gustav Koffmane, Breslau, Member of the Board of the German Reform Association in Breslau;Geza von Onody, Tisza-Eszlar, Owner of a Manor, Member of the Hungarian Reichstag;Wilhelm Pickenbach, Berlin, Merchant, Chairman of the German Reform Association in Berlin;Alexander Pinkert-Waldegg, Dresden, Editor-in-Chief, Chairman of the Central Committee of the German Reform Party and the German Reform Association in Dresden;Ernst Schmeitzner, Chemnitz, Owner of a Publishing House, Chairman of the German Reform Association in Chemnitz;Rudolf Skalla, Iglau in Moravia, Industrialist, Chairman of the Austrian Reform Association in Iglau;Court Preacher Adolf Stöcker, Berlin, Member of the German Reichstag and Prussian Chamber of Deputies, President of the Christian-Social Party in Berlin;Carl, Reich Baron von Thüngen-Rossbach, at Rossbach in Lower Franconia, Owner of a Manor;Edmund Winterfeldt, Breslau, Editor, Member of the Board of the German Reform Association in Breslau;Sir Carl von Zerboni di Sposetti, Vienna, Editor, Member of the Board of the German Reform Association in Vienna;Ferdinand Ziegler, Breslau, Factory owner, Chairman of the German Reform Association in Breslau.

The First International Congress was convened in Dresden to confidentially debate “the next objectives of the anti-Jewish movement as well as ways for more effective international countermeasures against the Jewish position in big finance and trade, in politics and municipal affairs, and in the press and the arts and sciences.” More than 300 of those invited from Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Russia participated in the congress. The discussions were chaired by von Bredow, an owner of a manor and a cavalry captain (retired), and by Ivan von Simonyi, Member of the Hungarian Reichstag; under their chairmanship the following items were passed:

First, the preceding Manifesto written by Victor von Istôczy, Member of the Hungarian Reichstag;

[ . . . ]

As well, a motion proposed by Baron von Thüngen-Rossbach and Baron von Fechenbach-Laudenbach:

Theses.

The meeting recognizes the increase of the Jewish national element and the Jewish influence on our entire national and state affairs as a serious and imminent danger to the moral and economic survival of the German people.

In order to break this influence and to eliminate the evils and danger inevitably resulting from it, it deems the following measures absolutely imperative:

The immigration of the Jews, particularly from the East, has to be prevented.

II.The predominant, largely capitalist and laissez-faire economics legislation has to be reformed. It excessively favors usury and the speculation taking place above all in the form of the share trading, banking, and stock markets over honest and upright forms of work. This should be done in such a way that those productive classes supporting the nation and the state are elevated and strengthened, whereas speculation, on the other hand, is reduced to a harmless level.

III.As long as the Jews persist in their isolation and form a nation within the nation, as it were, they ought to be regarded merely as foreigners who are accorded the right to hospitality. Consequently, their civil rights should be restricted in such a way that they can neither participate in legislation nor attain any authoritative offices, namely the office of judge.

IV.The Jews are to be exempted from military service, but in lieu of service have to pay a tax in the form of a capitation or military fee.